informant38
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...But of these sophisms and elenchs of merchandise I skill not...
Milton, Areopagitica

Except he had found the
standing sea-rock that even this last
Temptation breaks on; quieter than death but lovelier; peace
that quiets the desire even of praising it.

Jeffers, Meditation On Saviors


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4.3.05

Along the way most of us have been given the lesson of our insignificance in the universe - the speck on a speck at the edge of a galaxy that's just one among millions in a vast dark universe.
This is false teaching on both counts. The universe is not dark, and our stature in it is exactly that of a point on an infinite line, precisely between two infinite stretches. We live within an infinite thing, whatever it's called, but we also carry within us an infinite thing. We're so thoroughly trained to our insignificance that that interior world has to be championed, valiantly, just to get the idea expressed that it's there in all of us, that that's a real part of our being where and what we are.
The universe isn't dark, and that can be proved easily by a simple thought experiment:
I'm here, it's night, the sky is clear and I see a star. Someone's in Minnesota on the same night and they see the same star. Obviously a whole line of people stretching between here, where I am, and Minnesota, if the sky is clear where they are, can see that same star; so just as obviously that light is not coming to me as a line, though the illusion of that linear transmission is bolstered by the pointilist nature of the starlight I see. And if we fill the whole continent with people looking at that same star we have a plane on which the starlight is falling. And if we extend that plane in all directions, anyone standing anywhere on that plane can see that same star - logically what we have is a sphere of light expanding outward from that star in all directions, and from all visible stars in all directions. The universe is filled with light.
It's human arrogance, and something else I think, that keeps the idea of the known universe as being all there is. So that we have the illusory dark, surrounding void with its little pinpricks, and us here, with our tiny lives on this tiny planet, and maybe some extraterrestrials here and there, out there somewhere. But nothing else, no greater context - with its own boundaries and its own illumination. And certainly not an infinite something else, progressively greater and greater in compass, with no upper limit at all.
The inanimate nature of things at the sub-molecular level, and the possibility, voiced as a certainty by too many, of there being an end to matter - or more accurately "stuff" - down there somewhere, is just as much a product of human arrogance, and of something else I think. What that something else is is a matter for another day.

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